America has hundreds fewer dangerous illegal immigrants prowling its streets after President Donald Trump invoked a law from the founding era to deport criminal aliens associated with the terrorist organization Tren de Aragua. The Left greeted the action with outrage and legal challenges, while one Republican congressman called the president’s action “a great move” that overcame “screwy” legal objections. The action sets the stage for a series of legal challenges that may end with a federal judge’s impeachment, a Supreme Court ruling, and a definitive part of the second Trump administration’s legacy.

On Saturday, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a law signed by President John Adams and only used three times in U.S. history — to deport members of Tren de Aragua (TdA). The flights carried a total of 261 illegal immigrants, including 137 removed under the Alien Enemies Act, 101 Venezuelans removed via the more common deportation process, and 21 members of the deadly MS-13 gang, the White House specified.

“I think it’s a great move,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told his former colleague, Jody Hice, on “Washington Watch” Monday. “These people just want to wreck our country. These people are rapists, murderers, they are child traffickers. We need to send them out as fast as possible.”

But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which a California legislative committee once identified as “a Communist front,” sued to block the motion. The Trump administration must stop the flights in midair and return the terrorists to U.S. soil, ruled Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, on Saturday. (Seven years ago, Boasberg ruled the Trump administration cannot detain illegal immigrants allegedly seeking asylum for longer than eight days.)

Boasberg’s decision “supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans,” replied Attorney General Pam Bondi in a statement emailed to The Washington Stand over the weekend. “This order disregards well-established authority regarding President Trump’s power, and it puts the public and law enforcement at risk.”

Yet the deportations took place despite the ruling. The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele — who was elected in 2019 as a populist reformer — confirmed the illegal immigrants arrived in his nation in a statement released Sunday. The MS-13 contingent included “two ringleaders,” announced Bukele. “One of them is a member of the criminal organization’s highest structure.” The new additions will “make our prison system self-sustainable,” he forecast.

Democrats and Boasberg accused the White House of refusing to obey his ruling, a charge the Trump administration promptly rebutted. The White House confirmed the administration did not disobey legal orders but had already deported gang members before its issuance. “The administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order. The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory,” clarified White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt Monday. “A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrying foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from U.S. soil.”

The Venezuelan-based criminal enterprise came to the United Stats in waves during the Biden-Harris administration, alongside millions of other known illegal border crossings. TdA became infamous for carrying out murders, executions, and tortures across two continents. A viral video last year showed TdA members rampaging through and terrorizing residents of an apartment building in the Denver suburb of Aurora.

TdA has “set up shop in at least 17 states that we know of, where they’ve terrorized communities, committed murders, rapes, extortion” and “taken over apartment buildings in half a dozen cities — not just Aurora, Colorado,” Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies, told “Washington Watch” Monday.

Bensman did not understand “why the ACLU and others are so interested in protecting Tren de Aragua terrorists.”

Although the Biden-Harris administration designated TdA as a terrorist organization in July 2023, the lame duck administration extended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to citizens of Venezuela and three other nations on January 10 in an effort to prevent the Trump administration from deporting 1.2 million illegals.

“There were violent criminals and rapists in our country. Democrats fought to keep them here. President Trump deported them,” summarized Vice President J.D. Vance.

Not only did the administration not defy the ruling, but the court had no power to rule in a matter of national security, since Tren de Aragua is a designated terrorist organization, say administration spokespeople. “Plaintiffs cannot use these proceedings to interfere with the president’s national-security and foreign-affairs authority,” argued the Justice Department in a legal filing Monday. “This is not justiciable,” or open to legal remedy, Trump adviser Stephen Miller explained on CNN Monday. “He’s exercising his core Article II powers as commander-in-chief.”

“Does a district court judge have the right to direct or enjoin troop movements overseas?” asked Miller. Congressman Burchett, who has earned a reputation for speaking in unvarnished phrases, called the ruling “screwy.”

The president’s order details connections between Tren de Aragua and Venezuela’s socialist, anti-American regime. “TdA is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus,” it says. Venezuela’s Marxist president, Nicolás Maduro, leads “the regime-sponsored enterprise Cártel de los Soles, which coordinates with and relies on TdA and other organizations to carry out its objective of using illegal narcotics as a weapon to ‘flood’ the United States. In 2020, Maduro and other regime members were charged with narcoterrorism and other crimes in connection with this plot against America.”

The Left says the deportations, and the Founding Fathers whose legislation enabled them, violate American values. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) branded the Alien Enemies Act “un-American” and “xenophobic” in January, as she reintroduced the “Neighbors Not Enemies” Act, which would repeal the law.

But the president’s action and immigration policy has proven popular with the American people. In a new NBC poll, 56% of Americans say President Trump is bringing “the right kind of change” to border security and immigration more broadly. “This is how you lead with strength,” said Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.).

Boasberg’s ruling constitutes part of the Democrats’ plan to thwart the Trump administration’s popular initiatives through judicial activism, say conservatives. “Another day, another judge unilaterally deciding policy for the whole country,” said Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). “We’re headed toward a constitutional crisis.”

“For weeks, lawless lower-court judges have been arrogating the powers of the executive branch of government — forbidding Trump’s duly appointed and confirmed Treasury Secretary from accessing his department’s computers, demanding that Trump rehire useless temporary federal employees, forbidding his appointees from doing their jobs of prudently spending the money allotted to their departments — even enjoining Trump from revoking security clearances from a well-connected Swamp D.C. law firm,” wrote John Zmirak at The Stream. “If the president can’t constitutionally decide who gets security clearances and who doesn’t, then who does?” Such sweeping judicial rulings have called into question whether judges can issue national injunctions. Traditionally, legal rulings bound only the parties to the case, not any and all who may have joined such an action, the administration argues.

The action may revive conservative efforts to impeach judicial activists. “I’ll be filing Articles of Impeachment against activist judge James Boasberg this week,” announced freshman Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas).

In 2012, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich proposed impeaching judges who abuse judicial authority as part of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Democrats responded at the time by accusing Gingrich and the GOP of “intimidating the judiciary.” (The Washington Post’s conservative columnist, George F. Will, charged Gingrich with undergoing a “descent into sinister radicalism” and “intimidation of the courts.”)

Two presidential cycles later, prominent Democrats including then-President Joe Biden responded to Roe v. Wade’s overturn by proposing the next president pack the Supreme Court, as part of a broader anti-democratic effort to stack every branch of government.

Whatever the legal outcome, the Trump administration plans to see through its pledge to deport criminal illegal immigrants. “The Department of Justice is undeterred in its efforts to work with the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and all of our partners to stop this invasion and Make America Safe Again,” Attorney General Bondi told TWS.

The president’s stalwarts expect him to prevail in court, as well.

“I think he’s constitutionally legitimate,” said Burchett. “The president was correct in his dealings, 100%.”